Best distro for ThinkPad 600X?

I am resurrecting a 600X, with 576MB of RAM. What would be the "best" distro for this machine and what are the installation options? Although I was a developer for many years and have been working with Oracle and data warehouses for a number of recent years, I'm no longer conversant with the popular operating systems, so please consider me a "newbie". I believe there was an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to install linux on this machine. At the moment, nothing seems to be working so it might be considered a "clean slate".

Thanks for any help you can offer.

 

You can try out "lighter" distros like puppy linux, DSL, antix, crunchbang
you could also take a look at gentoo and debian, and do their minimal installs
lighter DE options would be xfce,lxde or openbox...for example

the thing about linux is you can use whichever distro you're comfortable with, in any configuration you want to try. If you want to use debian on it, go for it, and also..whichever login manager, desktop environment/manager you want.

You could do some research of your own on lightweight distros that would be adequate for that machine...you could also try out a few that peak your interest...just grab a usb stick,cd-r, or sd card... stick a distro on it and use the livecd option to try them out...

 

+1 for Crunchbang (openbox version).

 

+1 for "doesn't matter" (as long as you use lightweight software).
Most current distros have light DEs and tons of WMs in their repositories.

 

There are several light weight desktop environments that should be fine with your hardware. PCLinuxOS has releases in all of them and is the first route I would recommend.

LXDE (requires a minimum of 384 MB of RAM):
LXDE Desktop PCLinuxOS

XFCE (requires a minimum of 384 MB of RAM):
XFCE Desktop PCLinuxOS

OpenBox (requires a minimum of 384 MB of RAM):
Openbox Desktop PCLinuxOS

Gnome ZenMini (requires a minimum of 384 MB of RAM):
Gnome ZenMini Desktop PCLinuxOS

 

I'd say these estimates are pretty much on the safe side. I have Debian running fine with LXDE on a computer with 128MB of RAM without swapping and according to free or top the system uses about 40MB of that directly after login.
I guess PCLOS doesn't make it much heavier.

 

I think those estimates are taking into consideration the applications that users are likely to use, including the Control Center, which is a sweet thing to have.

 

Depends really in how dirty you want to get your hands...

Debian would be the first to come to mind if you were looking for something fast and stable and easy to install.

Slackware would be my second, with a tad less hand holding but a good distribution and probably the most Unix like (arguably).

Arch would probably be the best as every aspect of the computer is at your control. This takes some reading to setup properly but gives the best performance in my years of experience. KISS philosophy and all!

 

KISS is Slackware's philosophy (first)

Debian will require you to install non-free drivers, so Anti-X would be better because it's Debian based with very low overhead (Icewm?) and will have your critical software already there.

Arch is a PITA.....nothing else to say there....

But, yeah, if you don't mind the manual work involved, what Corbintechboy said is absolutely SOLID...those are the best out there IMO.

 

If Debian will require you to install non-free drivers because the hardware only works with them any other distro will require you to install them too.
You might just not notice it because not every distro seperates free and non-free contents in their repositories.

 

Your 600X is very similar to my T20 (Piii 700MHZ/512MB/60GB). I've been running Kubuntu for a long time, with very good stability. Yes, you can run a distro with a lighter GUI or window manager and the lighter weight display will feel zippier. Don't fear the "larger" distros.

Get a bunch of them, they're all free!!